The historic bargain linking American Jewry and Israel since the founding of the State is coming to an end. The terms of the deal were unspoken, but clear: Israel would provide American Jews with a sense of pride and identity as Jews, and they, in turn, would shower upon Israel their financial and political support. But Israel is no longer a source of pride for non-Orthodox Jews, and the identity it provides is not one which they wish to share.

That conclusion emerges from a recent study published by sociologists Stephen Cohen and Ari Kelman. They found that American Jews under 35 do not care very much about Israel. They are not just apathetic about Israel, that indifference is “giving way to downright alienation,” write Cohen and Kelman.

More than half of Jews under 35 said that they would not view the destruction of Israel as a personal tragedy. The death and expulsion of millions is something they could live with. By those standards, they probably would not see the Holocaust as a “personal” tragedy either.

What young Jews under 35 feel towards Israel goes beyond apathy to outright resentment. Israel complicates their social lives and muddies their political identity. Only 54% profess to be comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state at all. In Europe and on elite American campuses, internationalism and a world-without-borders are the rage. The Jews of Israel, with their stubborn insistence on protecting their nation-state, are, as always, out-of-sync.

Despite the post-Yom Kippur, pre-Sukkos euphoria which I hope is enveloping all our readers, last week’s thread on the Holocaust weighs heavily.

I have often wondered whether our own community’s playing fast and loose with historical accuracy (in Gedolim biographies, and in sanitizing history that doesn’t fit current expectation) would backfire some day. Would some of the more skeptical in our ranks come to doubt everything they saw in print, resulting in our own form of revisionism?

Last week’s responses to MK Tzivia Greenfield’s reaction to the Shofar at Auschwitz story left me with a feeling of deja-vu. To be sure, our readers rejected her outright dismissal of the Rabbi Meisels story. I found disappointing, however, that perhaps without realizing it, some of them seemed prepared to meet her halfway. They would not go so far to dismiss, as Dr. Greenfield did, the likelihood of people crying over the loss of a final mitzvah, rather than their very lives. But they entertained a good deal of skepticism themselves, and proposed a continuum of ways to deal with it.

Far be it for me, a dyed in the wool skeptic myself, to criticize skepticism qua skepticism. But in this case, it is misplaced - if not a downright slap in the face to survivors among us who are still living witnesses to so many corroborated stories of exceptional mesiras nefesh - in the true sense of the word - for HKBH, for halacha, for a final mitzvah or davening or d’var Torah. Most of us need not go much further than our own relatives and the relatives of friends to reassure ourselves of the frequency of such events.

Of all the silly sentences produced by American pop culture, my personal choice for silliest is Erich Segal’s, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” (Who but a Yale professor could have written something so dumb?) “Love means always being prepared to say you are sorry,” is far sounder advice to newlyweds.

Certainly, the Torah places a high premium on the willingness to seek forgiveness from both G-d and man. Verbal confession is one of the essential elements of repentance. And Maimonides, in his Laws of Repentence, teaches that on Yom Kippur G-d will not forgive our sins against our fellow man until we have made restitution and received his forgiveness. Thus the custom of requesting mechillah (forgiveness) as Yom Kippur approaches.

Neither admitting that we have wronged someone else or seeking his forgiveness comes easily to most of us. Who has not experienced holding a phone in the air while trying to summon up the courage to make an uncomfortable phone call to someone we have injured? And usually the receiver is replaced with the call still unmade.

Even with loved ones, whom we can be pretty confident of having recently injured, we tend to put off our requests for forgiveness to late on Erev Yom Kippur. The lateness of the hour leaves less time to dwell on unpleasant details. But it also provides none of the purgative power of a serious request for forgiveness, with all the soul-searching entailed.

Once again, official travel regulations are on the side of the observant traveler.

Stephanie Stoltzfus, the Manager of the External Compliance Division in the Office of Civil Rights and Liberties at the Transportation Security Administration, known to most of us simply as TSA, was kind enough to give me a heads up to TSA’s policies this season, as they appear on the official website.

TSA recognizes that the travel period for Sukkot, a significant event for persons of the Jewish faith, begins approximately on September 23, 2007, and ends approximately on October 4, 2007.

TSA’s standard operating procedures do not prohibit the carrying of the four plants – which include a palm branch, myrtle twigs, willow twigs, and a citron through the airport or the security checkpoints, or on aircraft. These plants are not on TSA’s Prohibited Items List.

A number of years ago I was walking through Barnes & Noble when I noticed a shocking book jacket. The title, emblazoned in big, bright red letters was Shanda and the cover picture was an overhead view of a man wearing a yarmulke; not just any yarmulke, but a royal blue one which had a bright pink pig emblazoned on the back. You can understand why the book caught my attention.

I am reminded of Rabbi Nosson Scherman’s quip that “Anyone who tells you not to judge a book by its cover never had to sell a book.”

I bought the book!

Shanda is the autobiographical account of Neal Karlen’s estrangement from the traditional Jewish home he was raised in. His approach to Judaism – and especially towards other Jews – is one that he describes as self-loathing. This continues until midlife when Karlen comes to the realization that, in fact, the Jew he hates most is himself. He is the shanda.

I had just concluded the morning Daf Yomi shiur when Donny, our resident Teimani, spoke up with a fascinating tale. This past Purim, his brother suffered a robbery at his Hertzeliya home. Thieves had stolen the housekey and picked the combination of his safe, making off with $50,000.

Donny arrived in Eretz Yisrael soon after that and together the brothers sought the counsel of HaGaon Rav Chaim Kanievsky, Shlit”a. I don’t have all the details of what he told them, other than a blessing for success in the matter.

One night several weeks ago, at 4 AM, Donny received a call from his brother: “Donny, I’ve recovered the money!” Earlier that day, Donny’s brother had received an urgent cellphone call to come home at once. Waiting for him there were the two young thieves. They had, in the interim, been chozeir b’tshuvah and had returned to the scene of their crime to return their ill-gotten gains, all 50K — plus an additional fifth of the original sum!

This all started me thinking, in the spirit of the season, about my own t’shuva prospects. Here was an episode in which two individuals’ repentance could actually be gauged in dollars and cents. A teshuva purchased at this high a price is one that will not easily be squandered — especially so in light of the natural propensity of a Jew to get his money’s worth!

At first I thought it was a joke. A Jerusalem shopping mall recently issued a glossy magazine supplement featuring its latest glitzy fashions. In the centerfold, in honor of Yom Kippur, was a Hebrew-language article entitled, “How to make it through the fast day.” Among the suggestions were the usual pre-Yom Kippur precautions: lots of water, no caffeine, many carbohydrates, and so forth.

What struck me was a sub-section called “Additional Tips for an Easy Fast.”(Free Hebrew lesson: the word for “tips” is tippim.)

It is possible, it informed us, to have a pleasant Yom Kippur even without eating. Among the best ways to take your mind off food is to watch some video, play enjoyable games like Monopoly, do some light reading, and meet with friends and family. It goes without saying that no mention is made of such hoary ideas as repentance, prayer, charity, heavenly ledgers of life and death - or, God forbid, God.

MY INITIAL reaction was one of deep mortification. If they don’t want to observe Yom Kippur, that is their choice. But why refrain from food and yet desecrate the day at the same time? Does God really desire this kind of fasting? Isaiah’s angry words (1:12) came to mind: “Who asks this of you, to trample My courtyards?”

Since Rosh HaShanah, we have said the beautiful prayer Avinu Malkenu – our Father, our King – numerous times. Painfully aware of our inadequacies, we approach God, our benevolent father and ruler, and beg Him to bless us in every possible material and spiritual way. Its first and last lines read:

Our Father, our King, we have sinned before You….

Our Father, Our King, show us grace and answer us, for we have no [good] deeds. Perform acts of benevolence and kindness for us and save us.

The text is familiar, yet the opening phrase of each line expresses a surprising reality about our perception of God, touching on what is sometimes called the ‘immanence-transcendence paradox’. It is axiomatic that God is distinct from everything in creation, perfect and unbounded in every way – as the ruler of the universe, He transcends it. Yet we also perceive Him as our Father, concerned and intimately involved with the affairs of each of us, our constant support and rock. Struggling with this contradiction is a feature of any meaningful religious life.

by William Kolbrener

The Rosh Hashana musaf prayer is the longest prayer in the liturgical cycle. In addition to the sections of the t’filah which characterize the other prayers from the High Holidays, there are three separate sections devoted to Kingship, Remembrance and the Blasts of the Shofar.

The section of kingship begins with our obligation to “acknowledge our thanks before the King who reigns over kings,” emphasizing the primary theme of the day: our bestowing of malchus—Kingship—on Gd. The section of remembrance begins with Gd’s remembrance of the entire created world (and all of history) and our imprecations that he remembers—true to theme—his covenant with his people. The third section on shofar begins:

You were revealed in your cloud of glory to Your holy people to speak with them. From the heavens You made them hear your voice and revealed Yourself to them in the thick clouds of purity… Moreover, the entire universe shuddered before You and the creatures of creation trembled before You during your revelation, our King, on Mount Sinai, to teach Your People Torah and commandments. You made them hear the majesty of Your voice and Your holy utterances from fiery flames.

I was terribly saddened by the memoir of R.Tzvi Meisels, ztz”l describing his blowing shofar in Auschwitz in 1944. I have, however, questions which really bother me.

So began a challenge from Dr.Tzvia Greenfield, who lives in the HarNof haredi neighborhood of Jerusalem (and ran on the Meretz ticket in the last election). I translated the episode into English (it turns out there are other translations) from the hundred Rabbinic Memoirs edited by Esther Farbstein.

Tzvia Greenfield continues her questioning:

The description of the Shofar blowing of Rabbi Meisels is undoubtedly heartbreaking. But why do you, Esther Farbstein or even (if I may say so) Rabbi Meisels himself assume that the weeping, shouts and begging of the young prisoners on the block awaiting their imminent execution had anything to do at all with his shofar blowing or with Rosh-Hashana in general?
Don’t you think that their heartbreaking crying and yelling was the natural result of their horrible fear from their imminent demise rather than from the sound of the shofar? Did they even HEAR the shofar?? Why attribute their behavior to the shofar blowing rather than simply to their incredible anxiety from death? Isn’t Rabbi Meisels (together with Esther Farbstein) a bit too presumptuous here?
Likewise with the bread for these poor youngsters destined to death: why assume that they begged so bitterly for a piece of bread for the purpose of “mitzva of the holiday meal” when it is so clear that they were simply dying of starvation?
Why assume that they clung to Rabbi Meisels because of his holiness rather
than simply because he was an adult who could perhaps save their lives - so they deluded themselves in their utter desperation? In short - why assume that the whole terrible scene described so touchingly by Rabbi Meisels had anything to do with Rosh Hashana or with any Jewish value?
To me the whole terrible event seems like a natural reaction to the immense fear of death and it has absolutely nothing to do with Yirat Shamayim or kiddush Hashem . I find it rather annoying or at least very problematic (and certainly not professional historically speaking) to attribute this whole experience to Jewish reasons. The poor young people were about to die, and they did not want to. So they cried. This is all. Horrible in its simplicity.
To start talking here of Rosh-Hashana and Shofar blowing seems to me to be not only
misconstrued but actually complacent and even distasteful, if you know what I mean.
Unfortunately these young victims fretted not about Yiddishkeit, but about the loss of their lives. Understanding them now as part of a religious narrative amounts - so I feel - to a betrayal of them.
It’s hard to explain, but I hope you’ll understand.
Tzvia Greenfield sums up:

It was an exercise in purely fanciful speculation, but it led to much productive discussion of what it means to be mamlich Hashem - to coronate G-d on Rosh Hashanah. I asked my guests what they imagined how, if at all, our task had changed in a year that the rants of atheists received as much media attention as the wisdom of professional athletes and movie celebrities. Would HKBH give us more credit in a year that Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al sought to quiet His voice? Or would He expect more of us in the way of undoing the damage they’ve done?

Chief Rabbi Sacks, apparently, decided to be machmir me-safek (take the stricter position). He takes on the lot of ‘em. Here it is, in all its elegance. No need to dilute it with my comments.

On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, more than at any other time of the year, we are conscious of standing before the Divine presence, giving an account of our lives. We may be many things, but we know ourselves to be part of a people who, for longer than any other, have defined themselves by a relationship with God.

At times it has been fraught and tempestuous, yet we have never ceased wrestling with God, or He with us. Faith — not blind but searching, questioning — is at the heart of what it is to be a Jew.

Rav Dessler, following the Vilna Gaon, learns the opening words of ya’aleh ve’yavo as descriptive of a process of ascent that brings our neshama ever closer to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. The seven terms of ascent – ve’yipakeid v’yizacheir are considered one term — parallel the seven heavens that divide us from HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

According to this scheme, the terms ve’yipakeid v’yizacheir, correspond to the highest degree of closeness to Hashem, when our neshamah stands in His immediate presence. And what precisely is the zichroneinu u’fikdoneinu that we call upon Hashem to remember at that moment of greatest intimacy?

Remembrance, when used in reference to Hashem, refers to His focus on the essence of the thing, on its name at the moment of Creation (Ramban to Bereishis 8:1; Maharal, Gevuros Hashem chap. 64). What we call upon Hashem to remember at that moment of greatest intimacy is the unique mission with which He charged us at the moment of our Creation.

Each of us has some mission in life that is ours and ours alone. No two human beings are born with the same talents or the same challenges; no two are born into the same familial situation or the identical time and place in human history. These unique aspects of each of us constitute the raw material within which our mission in life will unfold.

From the memoirs of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Meisels, ztz”l describing Rosh Hashanah 1944:

“The experience of one transport that left Auschwitz is seared in my memory. With the grace of HASHEM I was miraculously able to bring a shofar into the camp. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah I went from block to block, shofar in hand, to sound the tekiyot. This put my life in danger and I had to avoid the Nazis and malevolent Kapos. I thank HASHEM that due to His mercy and compassion I was privileged to sound the shofar that Rosh Hashanah some twenty times, coming to a hundred blasts en toto. This revived the spirits of the shattered camp inmates and gave them some peace of mind knowing that at least they could observe one mitzvah in Auschwitz - that of shofar on Rosh Hashanah.”

This begins the four chapters describing Rosh Hashanah in Auschwitz that I just translated into English from the preface to R. Meisels’ book, Mekadshey Hashem. The preface is included in the Hebrew CD-ROM Rabbinic Prefaces put out this year by the Michlalah-Jerusalem containing memoirs collected by the historian Esther Farbstein (who also authored Hidden in Thunder). She discovered over 100 prefaces by Holocaust-surviving rabbis. While the memoir is tragic, it is also moving and hopeful. Anything I could add is superfluous, so I will bring the entire description below, highlighting the paragraph in chapter 9 that made me cry.

Chapter 6 Blowing the Shofar in Auschwitz

My other favorite publication, Jewish Action, just released its fall issue. It contains a revisiting of the Codes controversy, in the form of a Sarah Shapiro interview with Harold Gans. (I’ve been trying to lure Sarah to join CC as a regular. She is still welcome, even after taking the wrong side on this issue. We won’t hold it against her - especially since my friend Yaakov Menken is also on the other side!)

The interview attempts to update JA’s coverage, which last visited this issue nine years ago. The introduction implies that there are new developments in the story. The review also refers to “an Orthodox rabbi who is one of [the] critics [who] declined to be interviewed for an article that would lend credence to Torah Codes.”

Both of these are true. The refusenik, c’est moi. Part of the reason for my refusal is that much has happened in the last nine years. We understand the methodology of the experimenters much better. We’ve had an opportunity to subject the phenomenon to other tests, including one agreed upon in advance by both sides. We’ve seen some of the problems generated by people coming to believe that this is really a part of Torah. And most importantly, we’ve had an opportunity to sit at a more than friendly Melave Malka in my home with Prof. Rips and Prof. Haralick and talk openly and respectfully about our differences.

The way Prof. Barry Simon and I see it is that nine years ago we saw the Codes as probably without merit, and possibly dangerous.

The more important something is to us, writes the Avnei Nezer, the greater the preparation we will devote to it. Athletes prior to a major competition or an important game, for instance, will train harder.

Elul is our preparation for the most crucial period of the year: the Yomim Noraim. Too frequently we do not utilize this period to the maximum. In Eastern Europe, it was not uncommon for married men to return for the entire month of Elul to the bais medrash in which they had learned in their youth, and to spend the entire month immersed in preparation for the Yomim Noraim. Our frenetic, fast-paced lives today seem to offer us no such opportunity. We consider ourselves to have done well if we can snatch a few hours during the month to really think about the Judgment that awaits us.

The metaphor of the athlete training for a big game, however, does not do full justice to the demands of Elul. If an athlete fails to train, he has increased his chances of losing, but he has not yet lost. Not so with us if we let Elul pass by without focusing on the task at hand. In that case, we are not in the same place we were before; we have further distanced ourselves from Hashem.

The great Jerusalem maggid Rabbi Shalom Schwadron used to give the moshol of a young man who emigrated from Eastern Europe to America. After many years of separation, his elderly father was consumed with a desire to see his son again. He sold everything he owned to purchase a ship ticket to America.

The tripartite division of the recent CNN series God’s Warriors into Jewish, Christian and Islamic segments conveyed its underlying message: Religions produce murderous fanatics. That particular trope features in all the recent spate of books proclaiming, “I am an atheist, and if you had any brains, you would be too.”

That thesis, however, is badly flawed. First, religious fanatics prove no more about the inherent nature of religious belief than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot prove about non-belief.

And the implicit equation of Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious fanatics is absurd. In the first two categories, CNN’s Christine Amanpour dredged up Dr. Baruch Goldstein and a handful of (largely unsuccessful) Jewish terrorists from the 1980s and a few Christian abortion clinic bombers. (The former allowed Amanpour to segue into a BBC-style frontal attack on Israel and the “Israel lobby,” already admirably dissected by Jonathan Tobin and Andrea Levin in these pages.)

Radical Islamists, by way of comparison, have killed thousands around the globe in recent years - in New York, Madrid, London, Bali, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Jordan, Afghanistan and Iraq. An Iranian regime with the declared mission of spreading the worldwide reign of Islam is on the verge of possessing nuclear weapons, and an already nuclear Pakistan could fall under Islamist rule.

Not much competition, really. Eveybody wins.

For many of us, no yom tov is properly observed without some immersion in the special works that lead to a deeper appreciation of the special quality of the day, the unique ohr that Hashem associated with that event. These works provide much of the inspiration we savor.

Which seforim work best for people? If you had to recommend something to a neighbor that you thought would inspire him and lead to a fuller appreciation of the Yamim Noraim, what would you suggest?

I’m going to open with a few of my own, and see if others will share their experience. The only requirements will be that the seforim should be appropriate to our audience, and they should not be the very obvious ones, i.e. you need not mention Shem MiShmuel and Pachad Yitzchok. Both English and Hebrew suggestions will be accepted.

We owe much to Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum.

Not just because he gave us an excuse to stop talking about Noah Feldman.

Not really for the substance of his remarks, either. Many readers of CC undoubtedly reached the same conclusions on their own.

Nor do we applaud him chiefly for his courage in stating what others will object to. B”H, while you probably will not find one on every corner, there are still more than a few people in the right-of-center Torah world with the courage to speak their minds.

21bEllul “Tsunami of porn” is the colorful phrase the Shmuley Boteach coined to describe the skimpy clothing and other phenomena that characterize much of modern behavior.

See his Jerusalem Post Sept.2 oped “Why women dress skimpily in the cold,” After exposing the problem of attire, or lack thereof, he writes:

And the most astonishing thing as all this takes place is the deafening silence. I do not know of a single important female voice decrying the tsunami of porn and the denigration of women in our time.

Well, there has been a voice, and that voice is speaking again.

Time Magazine’s cover story this week provides an opportunity for what Einstein (and others) called a “thought experiment.”

Time examines a different side of Mother Teresa. A veritable icon of spiritual strength and confidence in the eyes of the public, she spoke privately of a spiritual angst over the last fifty years of her life, in which she could not feel the presence of G-d. Remarkably, this dry period began just as she had extracted permission from her superiors to begin her ministry to the poorest of the poor on the basis of the direct communications she claimed receiving from G-d. Till the end of her days, she wrote to a string of confessors and confidantes about her unrequited love and her inability to pray. She questioned her very belief at times, but her faith trumped her doubts. During the entire period, she knew only one period of spiritual peace – five weeks in 1959.

Response to these revelations is predictably varied. Atheists like Christopher Hitchens believe that she secretly had discovered the “truth” (c”v); believers see her story as the triumph of faith over inner darkness.

Here’s the experiment. What if a Jewish Teresa had reported the same feelings? What would we have told her? What concepts and images would we have invoked for her, to help her through her crisis? I ask the question not because it is our place to comment on the inner workings of a faith system that is not ours, but because answering it may help us better understand the tools we have available to us as Jews, and to help those in similar straits.

To: Ernest Adams
From: Yaakov Menken
Subject: Your article in the Jewish Week
Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:18:00 -0400

Dear Mr. Adams,

I was quite intrigued by your article ["Straddling the Color Barrier," Aug. 31] in the NY Jewish Week, and thought to email you once I found your address at the bottom. Your sincerity and thoughtful attitude are obvious in your words, and for this reason I thought it especially worth corresponding with you when a few passages struck a disconsonant chord.

In particular, your friends’ warnings that the Orthodox “are rigid and racist” caught my eye. You repeat it twice, but then go on to recount your personal experience as you began dating: “Orthodox rabbis and congregants were veritably welcoming, with one prominent Orthodox rabbi promising to find me a wife as he encouraged me to move into his Brooklyn community.”

Great ideas speak for themselves. A little PR, though, wouldn’t hurt.

Aish HaTorah’s Project Inspire has floated an idea that I am enthusiastic about. Through a subsidy that allows them to do this at less than cost, you can reach out to non-frum Jews before Rosh Hashana with a jar of honey for as little as $3 including shipping.

There are a huge number of nonobservant Jews for whom the Yomim Noraim are one of the only times that their Judaism is on their minds. A frum rov in LA makes a point of personally going to the Israeli Consulate and inviting everyone to attend his shul, free of charge. A beautiful gesture like that is not only appreciated, but helps counteract the stereotypes some people have about Orthodoxy.

The Aish concept has no halachic complications that I can think of, sends a message that you care, ties in to tradition, and affords lots of opportunity for follow-up. It could be a great ice-breaker that will lead to a deeper friendship, and more opportunity to share Yiddishkeit in the coming year.